Apparently the bots have the only real authority at eBay!

I have been an eBay hater for years. Mostly to do with the way eBay and it’s sidekick Paypal treat sellers- with contempt. As an occasional seller, I have run into some glaring faults in eBay’s consumer protection. One case where a buyer refused delivery on the package and falsely claimed it was never delivered. Despite the tracking clearly stating that the package was refused, eBay sided with the buyer and refunded the money. I was now out my item and I had to pay shipping to get it back. Fought and won, but a pain in my ass. Mostly, I was selling my old iPhones. The last i sold an iPhone It only sold after it was listed for the fifth time. When the buyer actually paid for the item, before that, the buyer just blew me off. Of course eBay now wants 5x completed auction fee. More fighting with eBay. It’s just not worth it.

Despite all this, I come back to my abuser to sell some routers. I want to quickly list some items late afternoon Friday. I got them listed, which took me some doing. Apparently policy changes lead me needing to reword some of my boiler plate auction templates. Money orders no longer accepted, certain search terms no longer in auction title, etc. Even my auction software needed to be reauthorized. All these steps completed without incident. Finally my sonicwalls were listed. I’m done. I’ll list the rest later.

20 minutes later, i get an email from eBay that fraud was detected on my account and my auctions were canceled and and my account suspended pending password reset. I was able to reset the password, so that is not a problem. However, after nearly an hour on the phone with them (there is no chat or email support that i could find) no one could tell me (1) what triggered the fraud alert. More surprisingly, (2) no one could re-list the items. I got transferred from department to department and finally hung up and started drinking.

At this time should say that I have actually have the same IP as when i regularly sold on eBay. As a buyer, i have never stopped for long (including Lupin III DVDs just last month). I was using a relatively deduct selling software platform, but it still works, and I have been using with eBay for about a decade.

What would I like to see from eBay? An explanation. If there was an error, I would like to see an effort to correct the problem and prevent other users from experiencing this frustration. In general, I would like to see a greater effort to engage with both buyers and sellers to resolve issues. For example, why can’t I send a support email? Why can a bot do something that actual customer service people cannot undo?